Toshiba Portégé Z10t Ultrabook

Por­ta­ble & Con­ve­nient

With the trend of mo­bile com­put­ing at an all time high, users are re­ly­ing on smart­phones, tablets and Ul­tra­books to get their work done in a timely man­ner. Toshiba’s Portégé se­ries has al­ways been known for its porta­bil­ity and per­for­mance, mak­ing them one of the ma­jor con­tenders in the mar­ket. This month we test out Toshiba’s lat­est prod­uct, the Portégé Z10t, an Ultrabook/tablet hy­brid.

The Z10t is a ver­sa­tile de­vice that can be used as a note­book or detached to be­come a tablet. Un­like sim­i­lar mod­els avail­able in the mar­ket, the Z10t is sig­nif­i­cantly lighter, weigh­ing only 1.4kg even with the key­board at­tached. The Z10t has con­sol­i­dated the ma­jor­ity of its con­nec­tiv­ity ports to its main tablet body as the key­board at­tach­ment is ex­tremely slim. In terms of de­sign, we like the tex­tured cover of the Z10t, which has a rugged and pro­fes­sional feel, though we felt the tex­ture could have been used to also cover the more ex­posed bot­tom of the key­board.

While us­ing the Z10t, we found the 11.6” LED dis­play a lit­tle small but still highly con­ve­nient thanks to its re­spon­sive touch­screen. De­spite the small and thin size of the key­board, typ­ing on it felt nat­u­ral and its back­lit lights help when typ­ing in darker en­vi­ron­ments. Our only quib­ble was the key­board’s small touch­pad, though the Ac­cuPoint pro­vides users with more ac­cu­rate con­trols. Even when detached from the key­board, the Z10t is still highly use­ful as you can surf the web eas­ily and even dis­play your pre­sen­ta­tion on big­ger screens via the HDMI con­nec­tiv­ity port.

Our re­view unit came with an In­tel i5-3339Y pro­ces­sor and 4GB of mem­ory. To test the per­for­mance of the Z10ts, we used our suite of syn­thetic bench­marks. To gauge the over­all ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the de­vice we used PCMark8, PCMark7 and PCMark Van­tage to record the Ultrabook’s per­for­mance. With PCMark8’s Work and Creative tests, the unit man­aged to give us scores of 2,469 and 1,207 marks, re­spec­tively. On the other hand, the Z10t’s PCMark7 and PCMark Van­tage re­sults were 2,822 and 9,259 marks, re­spec­tively. The scores es­sen­tially tell us that the Z10ts is un­der­stand­ably not the most pow­er­ful ma­chine in the mar­ket. How­ever, it has more than enough power to han­dle pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware and other com­mon com­put­ing tasks.

We had to re­place our usual 3DMark Fire Strike test with the less de­mand­ing Ice Storm test to match the unit’s in­te­grated graph­ics ca­pa­bil­i­ties. The Ice Storm test which is suit­able for en­try level PCs man­aged to give us a rea­son­ably good score of 15,612 points. Fol­low­ing that, we tested the Z10t’s bat­tery life and man­aged to record 3 hours and 47 min­utes from the Pow­er­Mark test, which is rea­son­ably long.

The Toshiba Portégé Z10t is a highly adapt­able ma­chine for in­di­vid­u­als that are look­ing to bal­ance be­tween power and per­for­mance. Thanks to its in­tu­itive de­sign, we be­lieve that this de­vice is great for users that con­stantly need to work on-the-go.

The key­board al­lows users to eas­ily type in the dark thanks to its back­lit fea­ture